Still looking for an MSA panel? Try these

With the call for papers extended, there’s still time to find a panel for this year’s Modernist Studies Association conference, to be held August 10-13 in Amsterdam.

Not sure who to approach? Try some of the suggestions below.

Feminist/Queer Temporality

The H.D. International Society invites paper submissions for the proposed panel it is organizing, “Feminist/Queer Temporality,” for the Modernist Studies Association conference in Amsterdam, August 10-13, 2017. In keeping with MSA 19’s main theme, “Modernism Today,” and one of its subthemes, “Modernist Chronologies,” we seek papers that examine what modernist women writers do with history, deep time, plural vs. singular temporalities, speed, nostalgia, or futurity. How do modernist women writers (H.D. and/or her female modernist contemporaries) produce feminist or queer temporality?

Please send a 250 word paper abstract and a brief bio/CV to Rebecca Walsh at rawalsh@ncsu.edu by January 27, 2017.

With thanks,

Rebecca Walsh and Celena Kusch, co-chairs of the H.D. International Society

Fascist Rebirth, Modernist Resistance

This panel looks to the earlier moment of fascism’s rise within the context of Modernism to try to better understand the contemporary appeal of fascist rhetoric as well as the possibilities for resistance to it. It centers around the question: how does fascism make its promise of palingenesis?

Building upon Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending, where Kermode notes, “correlation between early modernist literature and authoritarianism which is more often noticed than explained: totalitarian theories of form matched or reflected by totalitarian politics,” Griffin argues that there is an ideological continuum where the animating myths of art made their way into the political realm; in particular Griffin suggests that none of the myths marked both modernism and fascism as strongly as the promise of palingenesis, rebirth—a new art for Modernism and the “new man” for fascism.

How do fascist aesthetics strive to create this “new man”? What are fascism’s aesthetic modes of indoctrination and inculcation?

Book machines: modernist bibliography and the dawn of digital humanities

Bringing such a history to light, this panel reads modernist books on digital computers while also understanding computers themselves as modernist books. Papers may cover a range of bibliographic practices, including but not limited to genetic criticism, writing under constraint, Oulipo, automatic writing, Surrealist experimentation, cut-up technique, typography, library and information science, cryptographic literature, and other experimental bibliographic methods.

They will use digital methods to demonstrate and investigate these experimental modernist bibliographies; at the same time, papers will also reflect upon the role of such bibliographies in shaping digital methods in humanities scholarship. In particular, papers will collectively investigate âdigital modernismâ as a longstanding critical tradition that stretches well back into the twentieth century; in so doing, they will come to understand digital modernism today as a method for investigating modernist computing in the past, reframing digital scholarship as a form of epistemological archeology.

While individual papers take a textual studies approach to modernist works, the panel as a whole will engage in a genetic criticism of digital modernism itself, tracing contemporary practices back to their roots in modernist writing methods. Through clear and rigorous restorations of digital modernism in the twentieth century, panelists will construct a more complete vision of digital modernism today.

Modernist Forms of Social Exclusion and Negative Affect

In recent years, critics such as Anne Cheng, Heather Love, Ann Cvetkovich, and Jonathan Flatley have explored negative feelings as important resources for theorizing the social. Drawing on this scholarship, our panel challenges the distinction between subjective alienation and collective marginalization, and how experiences of negative affects are instanced through narrative form. We are interested in reading modernist and late modernist forms that represent various accounts of stigma, nonbelonging, and self-dispossession, not simply in terms of individual predicaments, but as an archive of literary forms that afford these social experiences particular affective and ethical resonances. By so doing, our panel seeks to challenge the distinction between the personal and the political, reading affective form

We are interested in reading modernist and late modernist forms that represent various accounts of stigma, nonbelonging, and self-dispossession, not simply in terms of individual predicaments, but as an archive of literary forms that afford these social experiences particular affective and ethical resonances. By so doing, our panel seeks to challenge the distinction between the personal and the political, reading affective form as as aesthetic hinge between the linked domains of experience. Despite the famed second-wave feminist formulation, “the personal is political,” why are some narratives of social exclusion dismissible as “merely” subjective? How may the form of these narratives help us reframe questions of identity and positionality, of bad feeling and

Despite the famed second-wave feminist formulation, “the personal is political,” why are some narratives of social exclusion dismissible as “merely” subjective? How may the form of these narratives help us reframe questions of identity and positionality, of bad feeling and unbelonging? Can the ineluctably individual experience of “feeling bad” as depicted in modernist forms challenge prevailing notions about the proper relation between collectivity and subjectivity, notions that remain mired in the discourses of positive uplift and recuperating the ideal of collectivity?